Is God Real or is this all a Cosmic Catfish?

Is there a God? This is a question that humanity has wrestled with for as far back as human history goes. Of course, there have been countless attempts at answering the question from both the sincere and the satirical. Religious practitioners throughout centuries all seem to have developed their own versions of theological conceptions and with so many to choose from, doesn’t that make the choosing kind of arbitrary? An agnostic would subscribe to this way of thinking, believing that none of us ever really will or can know any truth about the world beyond the laws of physics and nature. Maybe there’s a God out there, but if God does exist, we would never really know it anyways. And then, of course, the atheist makes the claim that there is no God with no qualifiers whatsoever. Going further, many atheists claim that religion is actually one of the great evils of the world and we would all be better off if we just put the God question to rest, once and for all. Well, that’s just foolishness and all month long we’ll not only be offering our answer to the question, “is there a God,” but we’ll do our best to introduce you to Who He is and let you know what this means for you!

So, is God real and if He is, how can we know it? One excellent response to this question actually arises from the scientific community with what is known as the Cosmological Argument. The Cosmological argument is a 3-step argument from induction and it goes like this: 1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause. 2. The universe began to exist and therefore 3. The universe has a cause. It’s a seemingly simple answer to a complex problem, but does it actually hold up?

First, lets take a look at the first premise, “Everything that begins to exist has a cause.” This one is pretty straightforward. Afterall, we can look around us and see that spontaneous existence isn’t something that we can observe in the natural world. If it’s not observable, testable and repeatable, then it doesn’t conform to the basic scientific method. So, scientifically speaking, premise 1 is pretty rock solid. Premise 2 is where things become a little bit shakier.

The universe began to exist. The tricky word here is “began.” Scientists and philosophers have debated the origin of the universe for centuries, with the consensus swinging back and forth over time. Aristotle believed that out of nothing comes nothing, and therefore what exists must always have been. Throughout the years, the pendulum swung back and forth until Einstein’s work on the theory of relativity led 20th century cosmologists to the conclusion that the universe is expanding, which was confirmed in the 1920’s. The fact that the universe is in a constant state of expansion means that it is expanding out from a central point. That central point is called the singularity; where and when our universe was essentially birthed from. We also have the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy of an isolated system always increases, meaning that eventually the universe will run out of energy. If the universe had always been, then that energy would have run out long ago. This means that the universe, at some point in the distant past, began to exist. Evolutionary scientist, theoretical physicist and cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin said it like this:

“It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape: they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.”

-MANY WORLDS IN ONE: THE SEARCH FOR OTHER UNIVERSES (MACMILLAN: 2007), P. 177. JAN 01 . 2007

So, we have premise 1: All things that begin to exist have a cause, and we have premise 2: The universe began to exist which brings us to the 3rd step of the cosmological argument: The universe has a cause.

The statement, “the universe has a cause,” might sound simple but it has huge implications. When we talk about the universe, that’s encompassing everything, not just space, but matter and time, as well. So, whatever caused space to come into existence has to exist outside of space. Whatever caused matter and time to come into existence must necessarily be immaterial and spaceless. But, that’s not all. The cause of our universe must also be uncaused itself. If it created time, it can’t have a beginning, otherwise it would exist linearly within time and therefore could not have created time. On top of all of that, this cause would have to be supremely powerful, as in there could be no conceivable greater power. To have caused everything that does exist to come into existence would require an immeasurable amount of creative energy. This cause would have to be more powerful than the combined power of every star in every galaxy, known and unknown, and also have the ability to know how to wield that power to create them. It follows, then, that this supremely powerful, creative cause must also have an independent will or free-agency. To start something, anything, requires a proactive choice, it cannot happen reactively. John Hammond, the eccentric billionaire from Jurassic Park said it like this, “Creation is an act of sheer will.” Remember, this cause is uncaused, meaning that there are not outside forces exercising natural laws or influential wills against it. This cause chose to create the universe, it made an actual decision to do so. So, the term “it” no longer applies. All of this information means that our universe was not created by a what, but a who. A being. That being is, by definition, God.

So, God exists. That statement alone holds huge implications. But we also said that God has a will and makes independent choices, meaning that God has a personality by merit of intentionally choosing some things over others. But, establishing the framework for there being an actual God doesn’t actually tell us who God is and there with so many religious interpretations, how can we know which one, if any, is correct?